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One year ago.

The news: People are signing up for Dropbox accounts at a tremendous rate. The company has doubled in size from a year ago, to 100 million users. They're saving files at immense volumes, too. One billion files are saved in Dropbox every 24 hours.

Given the company's typical conversion rates around getting free users to pony up for monthly subscriptions, Dropbox is likely very close to $500 million in revenues. Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston would not confirm or deny this figure, but did say that conversion rates have held steady. Recent history: a year ago, Dropbox raised $250 million at a $4 billion valuation from investors including Index Ventures, Sequoia, Greylock, Benchmark, and Accel, among others.

This latest increased level of users and activity, per Houston, allows the company to think much more broadly about where it might go next. As he explains it: “We can move away from Dropbox as this magic folder and think of it as the home for all the information you care about, things like your to-do list, notes, passwords, the things that should follow you around the Web.”

Other important trends are shifting at Dropbox.

This summer the majority of sign ups started coming from mobile users (previously file sharing accounted for most sign ups). This has been buoyed by Dropbox’s partnerships with Samsung and HTC whereby the company’s technology is stitched into every phone, and more importantly every experience a phone buyer has when they set up their device. That likely continues and eventually could push Dropbox's conversion rates higher thanks to a new feature that automatically uploads the snap-happy photos people take on their phones into their Dropbox accounts.

A year ago we put Houston on the cover of Forbes in a story that put him and Dropbox in the echelons of great technology hit-makers. Since then, he’s been almost suspiciously quiet and the headlines surrounding his storage and file sharing site have not been steadily stellar.

Dropbox has been called the “problem child” of cloud security, which is a tough blow for a company trying to gain trust from its consumers users and more recently, the three million businesses that are using the service. Big competitors, too, have come sprinting into the market to steal some of Dropbox's buzz if not customers. Apple’s iCloud has been out for a year and Google this August launched its own file storage offering, Google Drive.

Houston says he is watching closely and listening, but largely unfazed. Those rival company launches haven't taken any toll Dropbox's growth. Meanwhile he’s been busy, he says, turning Dropbox from hit startup to fast-paced and hefty company.

He’s hiring as fast as he can and claims that convincing people to come is the easy part, while “finding that 1 in 1,000 engineering person” is very hard. He started this year with 90 employees. Dropbox will soon reach 250 employees. He's hired engineers dedicated specifically to security, though he won't reveal how many.

Last year we estimated Dropbox was on track to reach $240 million in sales, based on the fact that though 96% of its customers use the service free, the remainder pay and nicely make up for it. Houston confirmed that Dropbox’s conversion rate hasn’t changed materially since then, which would put the company’s revenue at nearly $500 million.

As for competition from the industry's giants?

Says Houston: “All these big companies are busy punching each other in the face. They’re going after each others' core businesses. Google is into social networking. Facebook wants to be into search. That’s good for us. The good engineers at those companies want to go on the front lines of these galactic battles rather than in our space. That more than anything else is why we have a unique opportunity.”